A power device may be an electronic device or devices that may be used to provide a desired form, type, or amount of electrical power to a load. Examples of power devices may include: switched mode power supplies, linear regulators, step up converters, step down converters, fly-back converters, AC/DC converters, rectifiers, inverters, frequency changers, interleaved and multiphase converters, and so forth. The analysis of the performance of power devices may be improved by providing a way for status information from the power devices to be communicated to a host controller. The host controller may be coupled to the power devices by a communications bus, such as a PMBus, for example. The host controller may then communicate with the power devices, issuing instructions and retrieving status information, for example. In situations when there are more than one power device coupled to the host controller, the power devices may share the communications bus. In addition to a communications bus, the host controller may be coupled to the power devices using a peer to peer interface.
A high bandwidth communications bus may be expensive. Therefore, a communications bus having a lower bandwidth may be used in more cost sensitive applications. Furthermore, when the host controller needs to communicate with a number of power devices, even the high bandwidth communications bus may not provide adequate bandwidth to provide timely delivery of status information or instructions. This may lead to a delay in the exchange of instructions and/or status information. For example, in the event of a failure of a power device, the host controller may need to be able to retrieve status information in order to analyze the nature of the failure of the power device. The delayed exchange of the status information may lead to erroneously timed status information. For example, status information arriving at the host controller may be invalid since the status information was from some time period in the past. To further complicate matters, status information may arrive at the host controller at different times and out of order, thereby invalidating the status information.